Knowledge subgoals in plans

Abstract

Plans naturally contain subgoals about how the world must be. They arise as preconditions of actions in the plan — having keys in order to unlock doors and so on. Plans also contain subgoals about what the agent must know — combinations of safes, Mary’s phone number, which way the outlaw went. Merely stipulating that actions and operands must be known is a hack. This paper offers an account of actions done under uncertainty. If the account is accepted, knowledge subgoals arise automatically, since plans done under uncertainty must still be adequate descriptions of what to do. Plans with knowledge subgoals turn out to be very like ordinary plans.